Living Oil

Petroleum Culture in the American Century

Stephanie LeMenager

Description

Living Oil is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels and memoirs. The book's unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil's omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and Aspirin tablets. The book makes a
strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, non-human lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petro-culture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American Century.

Living Oil

Petroleum Culture in the American Century

Stephanie LeMenager

Author Information

Stephanie LeMenager is the Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States.

Living Oil

Petroleum Culture in the American Century

Stephanie LeMenager

Reviews and Awards

"As this intriguing book makes clear, from Texas to Alberta we're an oil-soaked continent. That oil has gotten into our brains and done much to make us who we are-it's very useful to recognize that, so we can maybe do something about getting beyond it."
--Bill McKibben, author Oil and Honey: The Education of An Unlikely Activist

"An impressively researched, eloquently written critical-historical account of the seductive fascinations and cultural politics of petroculture's stranglehold on bodies, minds, imaginations, and communities during the past century, in North America and throughout the rest of the world. LeMenager's combination of analytical sophistication and narrative flair makes Living Oil a breakthrough accomplishment for the new environmental criticism."
--Lawrence Buell, author of The Future of Environmental Criticism

"Gracefully written, poignant, and fiercely intelligent, Living Oil reveals the centrality of petroculture to American modernity. LeMenager's synthetic brilliance across a wide range of genres and discourses not only demonstrates how profoundly oil has shaped contemporary culture, but offers us the possibility of genuine change. This is an invaluable book."
--Paul Outka, author of Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance

"The first great study of the complex cultural politics of the petroleum era, Stephanie LeMenager's Living Oil hums with critical energy. Moving effortlessly between memoir, literary study, testimony, travel writing, and social and political criticism, Living Oil can confidently take its place amongst the very best work in cultural studies being produced today."
--Imre Szeman, co-author of After Globalization